Every other week, Customer Love offers a quick snapshot of one of MailChimp’s wonderful users.
Who: Turntable Kitchen 
What: A website that pairs locally sourced recipes with great music
Where: San Francisco
Why we love them: Kasey and Matthew connect food to music, as their tagline goes, but they do so with great design and obvious passion. Plus, their monthly pairings box—which includes a seven-inch vinyl single, a digital mixtape, dried ingredients, and recipe cards—is just plain rad.
We were impressed to find out that Hugh MacLeod‘s MailChimp campaigns consistently maintain a fantastic 40%+ open rate. What does a cartoonist know about email marketing? Well, as it turns 
out, he doesn’t worry about all the typical “email expert” stuff like A/B testing, sending at different times of day, experimenting with subject lines, etc. Instead, much like Email Inspiration, he just sends a fun image, and the people love it.
“I think it’s because we keep it simple—a nice cartoon to brighten your day, delivered to your inbox every morning,” Hugh tells us. “People like getting that a whole lot more than, say, a daily, long-winded spiel about why y’all should give me your money, make me rich, yak, yak, yak…”
Instead of marketing himself to his readers, Hugh delivers his business-card cartoons into the inboxes of his extraordinarily engaged readership every day, then they send those cartoons to their friends, building up his list in the process. Pretty simple, right?
I just sent a MailChimp email update to almost 1.8 million recipients (here’s a copy if you’d like to read it). Whenever I do this, I normally get over 10,000 of those “I’m on vacation!” or “I have a new email address!” auto-replies in my inbox. It’s sort of an ironic reward for growing your email list. I appreciate irony as much as anyone, but the auto-replies can really put a damper on the fun I get from checking my stats, and replying to actual human recipients. So I hooked up our new app, ReplyTo.
Above, you can see it in action. So far, it’s prevented 3,200 of those autoreplies from flooding my inbox, and it’s even updated a few email addresses for me. With all this free time, maybe I’ll take a vacation or something.
Over the years, I’ve read a lot of interesting studies and predictions about mobile technology, but there always seemed to be something missing. Yes, we all know that more and more people are using mobile devices. Yes, we know that mobile devices render emails a little differently, so we have to design around that. But smartphones just outsold desktop computers, and we see people everywhere using them more than their PCs–that’s a sign that something else is going on here. So I asked our UX team to do some research that looks into the behavior of people when they read emails on their mobile devices. It’s a quick, 24-page guide that goes a little beyond screen resolution stats, and (hopefully) makes you think a little differently about mobile email.
For example, whenever marketing people talk about mobile, they usually talk about how “people are on the go!” which–since we’re talking about marketing people here–always leads to, “so we have to find ways to blast relevant messages at them *while* they’re on the go, like SMS marketing and near-field wifi fence blah blah blah.”
As a MailChimp user, we value your feedback and think it’s important for you to have an easy way to share your thoughts with us. Frankly, it’s where we get all our ideas, so we don’t just “value” your feedback–we need your feedback. That’s why we set up The Jungle, our private customer community on the Ning platform, a few years ago. For a while there, private social networks like this were growing pretty common. Now, they’re quickly becoming a thing of the past, and we’ve decided to adapt accordingly.
